What area of the city offers buyers the best return for their investment? Without getting into the 89 mls sub-districts, but broadly looking at the 10 districts (areas if you are jargon averse and want to avoid confusion with political or other city drawn disticts) which one has performed the best? SF real estate statistics surround us like a sea, but are they useful?

San Francisco MLS Districts. Source: San Francisco Association of Realtors.

Our team just didn’t vibe with a company-made chart presented at this week’s sales meeting. Which got us digging into a bunch of charts and numbers and suddenly we were down the San Francisco real estate data wormhole. How often we find ourselves in this place. Or, well, at least I do. Here’s the company chart that we don’t vibe with (it seems to be this thing I do):

Zephyr’s Chart

Zephyr used a quarterly basis for their numbers with quarterly values calculated using 3 month rolling averages. And while I agree those are reasonable paramaters, I also disagree. I pulled number using both average and median sales price, but looked at the average or median sales price for the year. I used YTD 2016 for 2016.

I did this because our sales volume and velocity, as well as all the linked market dynamics vary a lot by quarter. To average out that variation, I’m more comfortable using the average or median sales price based on the entire year’s sales and not a rolling average from one particular quarter that has some seasonality bias for lack of a better made up term?

Zephyr dropped D8 and D6 becauase they aren’t major single family areas. Which is, again, fair. But they do exist, so we think the annual average is a reasonable compromise and our chart includes them.

Using those adjustments, we come up with our own chart below using median sales price:

Appreciation by District using Median Sales Price

Our chart, using median sales price, agrees that the Richmond (d1) area of the city saw the highest single family home price appreciation. Our data isn’t as optimistic on any of the neighborhood gains as the Zephyr chart, but we both agree on the first place area.

But if you feel like arguing with us, we’re one step ahead of you. We just need to use average sales price, an argument we could make because the annual average sales price uses amongst the largest data sets (all sales, all months) and thus is big enough to “absorb” any skewing by outliers and the neighborhoods areas are small and similar enough and homogenous enough in price that the mean average still presents an accurate picture of neighborhood price appreciation:

So is the Richmond the hottest market or the seventh hottest? Did it appreciate at 28% or 48% or 76% since 2013? We could argue about it forever. But remember: you can’t buy a neighborhood. You can only buy a specific home in it, so our suggestion is to focus most of all on a particular home’s unique value to your life. It’s an investment you live in.

Until natural gas was an available energy source, it was manufactured at local gas plants now known by the lovely acronym of MGP (manufactured gas plant). At the time (roughly 1870 – 1930) manufactured gas was considered to be cutting edge technology. Coal and oil were the raw materials, and the gas that was created helped transform city life – for example, by powering gas street lamps. Unfortunately, gas wasn’t the only thing created at MGPs and some of the byproducts are now considered to be a health hazard (think VOCs and PAHs).

Historic location of Manufactured Gas Plants in the Marina area of San Francisco

What does this have to do with you? Believe it or not, even though these plants stopped operating by the 1930’s, the currently responsible legal party – Pacific Gas & Electric – is still doing site investigations, monitoring, and remediation where appropriate.

The manufactured gas plants in the Marina neighborhood were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, and then buried over again during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. So residential homes, businesses, and parks currently rest on land that was once used to manufacture gas. PG&E is emphatic that “There is no indication that PG&E’s former MGP sites pose any health concerns to the public, based on our testing, experience, and extensive review of medical literature.”

PG&E and the State of California came to a ‘voluntary agreement’ in 2010 that requires PG&E to continue monitoring and sampling for residual materials that may be present at these sites. Of the five location in San Francisco, the Marina sites are by far the most residential, so it is something you should be aware of if you are considering buying or selling a home in the Marina district. As for the other sites? The fisherman wharf site is now home to a hotel, the Potrero site is occupied by a warehouse, and the central waterfront site is under remediation (the former Potrero Power Plant).

Ken Block, an X-Games rally car driver, tears up the streets of San Francisco in a strange little car… and the video has gone viral.

So what does that have to do with my listing? If you watch the youtube video (embedded below), you’ll see Ken Block fly out of Russian Hill and land in Potrero Hill at about the 4:28 mark. (I love SF film edits that splice two non-adjacent neighborhoods together, but that’s another story). He hauls his strange little car (it’s like a Ford Fiesta with a crystal meth addiction, or something) on down Rhode Island Street, doing some crazy figure-eights at the intersection of Rhode Island and 22nd St. before launching himself down 22nd St towards the bottom of the twistiest street in San Francisco, which he flies up in the wrong direction.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDN2bCIyus

What does all of this have to do with me? Not much, except that Britton and I listed a condo at the intersection of 22nd and Rhode Island earlier in the year, and our sellers took some footage from their windows. If you don’t have anything else to do, you can see the Zephyr signing hanging on the front of the home at about the 4:38 mark. Our listing was the brown house with the sloped roof that looks like a single-family home but is actually a condo. Below is some bonus footage that our sellers took and gracefully shared with us:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWDUGvQ0Cxk

So there you have it, folks. Not only do you get bonus footage of a strange little car tweaking all over San Francisco, you also get a demonstration of my ability to take anything San Francisco and somehow turn it back to real estate and, well, me.

Seriously, hope you enjoy the footage. I can’t believe the city was completely cooperative with the filming, but apparently they were. Probably because people usually drive like Ken Block in San Francisco all the time… but that’s another story too.

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